The Thing

November 11, 2018 3:21 AM

Unexplained brain injuries afflicted dozens of American diplomats and spies. What happened? (The New Yorker)
posted by standardasparagus (29 comments total)

Sonic waves? Microwaves? Electromagnetic pulses? It's like something out of James Bond. There's no discussion of preventative measures which I understand, they don't know the cause but I think if I were assigned there, I'd be packing ear plugs at least.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:38 AM on November 11, 2018

I'd been waiting for someone to finally write an extensive investigative report on this.

Lee and her doctors didn’t know what to call the mystery condition, so some of them referred to it as the Thing. (Smith said other names came later, including Immaculate Concussion and Havana Syndrome.) At the end of the testing, Lee told one of the specialists that she didn’t think she had the Thing. The specialist replied, “Oh, it’s definitely the Thing.”

Yeah, glad we could clear that up.
posted by nightrecordings at 6:00 AM on November 11, 2018 [16 favorites]

Sonic waves?

Not a chance. Way too hard to steer, and walls and windows would completely screw up any attempt to focus them.

Microwaves?

Much more plausible.
posted by flabdablet at 6:16 AM on November 11, 2018 [3 favorites]

Are tin foil hats validated now?
posted by Borborygmus at 6:28 AM on November 11, 2018 [7 favorites]

It’s fairly well known that you don’t need to hit your head on something to get a concussion - anything that makes the brain hit the sides of the skull can do it, like blast impacts from an explosion or being around intense changes in air pressure. So that part of this article is intensely annoying, but not as annoying as the doctors who insisted that psychological factors were probably the cause. A lot of damage from concussions doesn’t show up as structural damage on scans, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real damage.

(Ask me how I know so much about concussions....:/)
posted by heurtebise at 6:31 AM on November 11, 2018 [7 favorites]

"...the Moscow Signal and then given a full battery of medical and psychological tests. The committee did recommend "gonadal protection be provided" to the male test subjects, however, human testing was not pursued. The program was shut down in 1969, with an effect of the signal on behavior and/or biological functions deemed "too subtle or insignificant to be evident"
posted by clavdivs at 6:44 AM on November 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

It seems like it wouldn’t be hard to build a portable detector for the various posited attacks. Something you could wear on a lanyard perhaps.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:01 AM on November 11, 2018 [4 favorites]

If you take the microwave-weapon model and assume multiple triangulated beams, you could presumably have three or more emitters whose signals intersect in a fairly small area, limiting their dectectable impact to within a few feet of the target. Maybe worse, if you pick just the right microwave frequencies and modulate them just so, you can thermoelectrically create a highly-targeted experience of sound without undirected air vibrations - the effect has been known since the 70s, and people have been talking about it on and off for 20 years or so that I've been aware of.

For the record, I actively resent the fact the tinfoil-hat crowd's claims that the government can "beam thoughts directly into your head" is in the strictest sense true, and I'm going to resent it even more when people start to catch on to the fact that you can probably do this trick with the parts you'd find in common household appliances.
posted by mhoye at 8:02 AM on November 11, 2018 [11 favorites]

I can think of one nation-state with a gigantic black-ops budget, a reputation for right-hand / left-hand conflicts, intel ops going rogue, and a generation of directed energy weapons R&D. And it strikes me as odd, suddenly, that this nation-state doesn't show up on anyone's suspect list. And that it's officials say things like:

Such a thing cannot happen in Cuba without the Cubans knowing. The thing is, it didn’t happen.

Adopting absolute certainty about secret capabilities, absolute certainty about a negative?
posted by Western Infidels at 8:26 AM on November 11, 2018 [3 favorites]

Such a thing cannot happen in Cuba without the Cubans knowing. The thing is, it didn’t happen.

It’s a sentence with pronoun trouble. I read it to mean that the Cubans did know what happened.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:00 AM on November 11, 2018 [3 favorites]

I've read the JAMA study and it's symptomatically nonspecific, with no controls, and basically vague nonsense. Stating lines like this "a battery of tests, which confirmed that the C.I.A. officers had sustained serious injuries" elides over the fact that noone outside the military-funded report writing bubble agrees. This reeks of a weaponisation of psychogenic illness. The physics of the supposed weapon is unlikely, and the postulated pathophysiology is just kooky. We may as well say that witches did it.
posted by meehawl at 9:03 AM on November 11, 2018 [6 favorites]

I just watched The Thing again late last night, and this may not map exactly, but it's got unsettling parallels.

I really appreciate your post. I had read about this, but since the news was fresh at the time and not very informative, I came away with the vague idea that it was probably mass psychogenic illness. I'm obviously no doctor, but there is a whole hell of a lot more going on here that the usual repressed emotions and moral panics that underlie those episodes.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:08 AM on November 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

Childs: "I just cannot believe any of this voodoo bullshit."

Palmer: "Childs, it happens all the time, man. They're falling out of the sky like flies. Government knows all about it, right, Mac?"

-'The Thing', 1982.
posted by clavdivs at 9:36 AM on November 11, 2018 [7 favorites]

I've read the JAMA study and it's symptomatically nonspecific, with no controls, and basically vague nonsense.

Having controls for a one-off possible human-initiated attack seems ... challenging. This standard would certainly reduce the cost of law enforcement, though. "You say you were robbed? At gunpoint? Any control group? ... All right then, give us a call when you've improved your experimental controls and we'll be right over!"
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 9:58 AM on November 11, 2018 [17 favorites]

I mean, I don't know shit, except that when I first heard about this I thought: microwaves. Because stories of people caught inadvertently near radomes when they're scanning. You hear the popping or the frying noise, each sonic impulse as each microwave burst is sent out. I can only suppose the big "mystery" about is due to a refusal for anyone to commit publicly to a cause that implicates a nation state -- as opposed to a "virus" or whatever. Because if there was an implication, there would be a demand to follow up on it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:23 AM on November 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

I have given a lot of thought to this because I have some of these symptoms, and I am a nobody. I am a nobody with history of head injury, and a long history of hospital service in a tertiary care setting. (I'm sayin' I can speculate as well as the next individual.)

I am not a drinker or a drug user, nor herbal remedy user, I have no prescriptions for medicine. On New Years eve last year at 6PM I stumbled over a one inch curb, to a nearly flat driveway, I tried to catch myself twice, left, then right, doing awful damage because I wasn't really with it, then finally fell from a 30 degree angle which didn't hurt, the attempts to not fall, did the damage. But there was an instant up front where I had a dark 3-d vision down through my whole body, which showed an image, kind of like an x-ray, of my toe in the Keene sandal, catching the curb. I had a totally unique to my life experience full body, cellular inflammation, for a month after. I thought this was like being attacked with a satellite mounted weapon. (But, I am a nobody.) However the driveway is in a flight path where the radar might be switched on prior to landing at Meadows Field, and there is a microwave tower within two blocks.

My speculation is that a dual beam, one to locate then the other to harm is a possibility. I speculate that our personnel have chip implants for ease of our location in the case of kidnapping while on duty, and for our own surveillance of our own personnel. It is possible that during regular medical procedures these devices go in unbeknownst to our personnel. It could be these devices, depending on where they are in the body, might react to routine ambient radar or microwave bursts that would otherwise not affect them. So if one person has the nano chip near the ear they react differently than the person who has it in the shoulder. Then there is the possibility of routine vaccinations for diplomatic personnel, causing reactions in susceptible individuals, the reactions coming at random intervals, but similar in sensation and damage. This might be a new and improved malaria vaccine, or a brand new zika vaccine hurriedly rolled out. I also have wondered about passing ships, who sweep with radar or a weapon they pinpoint and they are able to target victims easily, because they are chipped some in one body area, where they get injured, and some chipped well away from the central nervous system so they don't get injured.

If people are chipped, then anyone can locate them, target them, any interested state or criminal actor.
posted by Oyéah at 10:28 AM on November 11, 2018 [4 favorites]

Can someone clarify this (admittedly tangential) detail:

Rhodes had access to secure communications links in the Situation Room, in the basement of the White House. But the Americans couldn’t share those channels with the Cubans, whom many in the U.S. security establishment viewed as formidable adversaries. Castro came up with an unorthodox solution. He created two Skype accounts—one for Rhodes and one for himself—using American-sounding fake names. From then on, his Skype calls were piped directly into the Situation Room.

Their security precaution was using fake names on skype? Really?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:38 AM on November 11, 2018 [3 favorites]

Having controls for a one-off possible human-initiated attack seems ... challenging

The control group would have been a random cohort of similar subjects, also subjected to the same scans, including the MRIs, etc. A good scientific report would have reported on within-group and between-group variability. They could also have selected them from a cohort of people with similar scale ranges in the MMPI2 for somatization, etc. The amount of random, nonspecific lesions in MRIs and various clinical vertigo assessments is surprisingly high, and the frequency depends strongly on how closely you decide to look. Scan any group of people in their 30s and above and I'm going to find a bunch of nonspecific regularities. Some may even have subclinical MS or other slowly progressing neuropsychiatric disease. There's simply no proof that this JAMA cohort differed in between-group evidence for imaging and clinical findings than a similar cohort not occasionally present in Cuba.
posted by meehawl at 11:17 AM on November 11, 2018 [11 favorites]

I think, based on flabdadlet's link and the article, that it was microwaves, it was the Russians, and the Cubans did know about it -- but only a specific faction of the Cubans headed by Alejandro Castro without the knowledge even of his father Raul, then President and head of the Communist party.

Raul has since resigned from the Presidency and Alejandro has been rusticated, both I guess probably as a result of the exposure of the truth about the attacks within the Party hierarchy.

I bet we know too, but as I am surprised the author of the article did not point out, there's zero chance a Trump administration would blame the Russians for this.
posted by jamjam at 11:50 AM on November 11, 2018 [5 favorites]

For the people that think it’s microwaves, what is one suppose to make of this part of the article:

During an interview in July, Smith voiced doubts that a microwave device could be targeted so precisely. “From what I do know about certain forms of energy that are medically used to remove nerve fibres, such as to reduce pain, I can’t understand how any source would be so selective to only injure the brain and not peripheral nerves and the spinal cord,” he said.

Are there microwave weapons that are able to be this specific from a distance? Did the Moscow Signal mentioned above do this specific of damage?
posted by gucci mane at 1:13 PM on November 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

Finally an explanation of this strange story I thought, seeing the headline. Instead, it's just a detailed explanation of the event, but without any serious attempt at explaining why. This article from NYT does a much better job. (It's almost like no one wants to give away what kinds of weapons they may have so try to pretend this all one big unexplainable mystery; and to dismiss it as psychological is, to put it mildly, not helpful. Also, as was hinted at above, what if a hardline faction in the good ole USA wanted to sabotage the new relationship with Cuba?)
posted by blue shadows at 1:27 PM on November 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

To get a little tin-foil-hat-y: Given the advent of Trump, it sounds like the people at State may have been trying to find a way to draw down without defeating the progress of the past several years. The mystery illness seems to have given them that result.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 1:58 PM on November 11, 2018

The Canadians and the case where the doctor was afflicted upon arrival makes me wonder what vaccines or other shots the state department gives its employees before sending them to Cuba, and if the Canadians use the same protocols. if you've ever seen anyone have a bad reaction to malaria medication, especially Larium, it sounds quite similar in some ways. And I do know people who have permanent balance and hearing problems from Larium, plenty of them too.

I doubt this was psychosomatic. I had viral encephalitis once and was brushed off by so. many. doctors. as a hypochondriac. But subsequent testing by a specialist similar to that in the article showed I did have damage to my brain. The tests are pretty specific. It was too long afterwards to see inflammation or lesions on the MRI but my vision/ balance connection has never fully recovered. I do better at balance testing with my eyes closed now, which is the exact opposite of what you should do. My hearing came back but it took years.
posted by fshgrl at 5:34 PM on November 11, 2018 [6 favorites]

Their security precaution was using fake names on skype? Really?

Hiding in a crowd is a viable technique.

I would guess that one of the reasons the Cubans are so good at espionage is that they’re not distracted by needing to use the 500X-DEMOBULATOR-V4 Secure Communications Device.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:35 PM on November 11, 2018

Are there microwave weapons that are able to be this specific from a distance?

Gucci mane, I agree with you that the lack of damage to other parts of the nervous system beyond the brain is a major challenge to the microwave theory, but a phased array emitter would probably do the trick. One of the exhibited arrays behind the link produces a beam pencil only 2.5 degrees wide, and an active phased array can be steered to point in almost any direction the operator chooses extremely rapidly.

There was a kind of control group for the group that was affected in Cuba, by the way: 14 people who worked for the US in China reported similar symptoms and were sent to the same Pennsylvania brain sciences institute that diagnosed the group from Cuba with brain damage. Of the 14, 13 were found to be unaffected, and the 14th had some problem which bore no resemblance to the problems of the group that had worked in Cuba.
posted by jamjam at 11:34 PM on November 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

meehawl: There's simply no proof that this JAMA cohort differed in between-group evidence for imaging and clinical findings than a similar cohort not occasionally present in Cuba.

They say one of the "virtues" of torture via electrical shock is that it leaves so few physiological signs behind. That's why torturers choose it. Nevertheless, in spite of leaving little or no evidence behind, it's a real thing that governments sometimes do.

Are the scientific, "proof"-level standards for describing a disease appropriate when the working hypothesis is a weapon designed to and/or selected because it leaves so little evidence behind?

Our modern ideas about American football and CTE developed over the course of nearly a century, and involved examination of dead victim's brains. Has anyone dissected an "immaculate concussion" brain yet?

Is the "weaponisation of psychogenic illness" a hypothesis that could in principle be tested? To an amateur, that sounds perilously close to "witches did it," frankly.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:09 AM on November 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

Neuroskeptic: Bad Science of the Havana Embassy "Sonic Attack"; More Confusing Science of the Embassy "Sonic Attack".
Guardian: Mass hysteria may explain "sonic attacks" in Cuba, say top neurologists.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:00 AM on November 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

Mass hysteria, pyschogenic illness, bullshit. That's just the old copout for when you don't know, or possibly don't want it to be known.
posted by blue shadows at 1:25 PM on November 12, 2018

Mefloquine causes toxic brain injury," says Dr. Remington Nevin, a former Army doctor, who's now with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
posted by fshgrl at 8:04 PM on November 12, 2018 [2 favorites]